RFID-laced
passports may be just the start of an Orwellian airport experience, warn
privacy advocates and authors Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre as the
nation braces for a rollout of the controversial technology in passports
this week.

They
point to a U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) concept video
created by CompEx Inc. that shows how citizens can be tracked and monitored
throughout an airport terminal -- without their knowledge or consent.

The
animated flash clip is posted on the authors' website.

In the
video, citizen "Bob" is remotely identified and tracked via Radio Frequency
Identification (RFID) devices as he enters an airport and navigates to
his gate. The video ends with chilling frames of a government agent surreptitiously
scanning Bob and his belongings as he sits in the waiting area.

CompEx
Inc. President Aram Kovach, who developed the film as a demo for the TSA,
received a U.S. Patent for the idea he calls "Method for Tracking and
Processing Passengers and their Transported Articles" in November of 2005.
According to company press releases, TSA officials entertained his ideas
twice, once in 2002 and once in 2003, and "offered to direct CompEx in
pursuing a segmented objective within the guidelines they have set forth."

"This
footage raises the specter of Soviet-style government surveillance creeping
onto our free soil," said McIntyre. "People need to know that our government
has actively considered these disturbing and invasive RFID concepts. With
RFID now appearing in our passports, the threat to our privacy and civil
liberties may be more than theoretical."

"RFID
passports will do little to keep us safer," Albrecht added. "On the contrary,
by requiring us to carry RFID tags in our travel documents, the government
is jeopardizing our personal information while doing little to slow down
the bad guys."

The
new passports are vulnerable to hacking and cloning by criminals. Last
week at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, German researcher
Lukas Grunwald showed how easily a criminal or terrorist could clone RFID
tags like those in U.S. passports using inexpensive and readily available
hardware.

Liz McIntyre is
a consumer privacy expert and author of Spychips: How Major Corporations
and Government Plan to Track your Every Move with RFID. In this explosive
book, McIntyre and co-author Katherine Albrecht reveal how organizations
like Procter & Gamble, Gillette, Wal-Mart, and even the U.S. Postal Service
plan to use tiny computer chips smaller than a grain of sand to track
everyday objects-and even people-keeping tabs on everything you own and
everywhere you go.

Katherine
Albrecht is a privacy advocate and co-author of Spychips: How Major Corporations
and Government Plan to Track your Every Move with RFID. Albrecht has testified
on RFID technology before the Federal Trade Commission, the California
state legislature, the European Commission, and the Federal Reserve Bank,
and she has given over a thousand television, radio and print interviews
to news outlets all over the world. Her efforts have been featured on
CNN, NPR, the CBS Evening News, Business Week, and the London Times, to
name just a few.